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DVD The Bicycle Thief
Vittorio De Sica's remarkable 1947 drama of desperation and survival in Italy's devastating post-war depression earned a special Oscar for its affecting power. Shot in the streets and alleys of Rome, De Sica uses the real-life environment of contemporary life to frame his moving drama of a desperate father whose new job delivering cinema posters is threatened when a street thief steals his bicycle. Too poor to buy another, he and his son take to the streets in an impossible search for his bike. Cast with nonactors and filled with the real street life of Rome, this landmark film helped define the Italian neorealist approach with its mix of real life details, poetic imagery, and warm sentimentality. De Sica uses the wandering pair to witness the lives of everyday folks, but ultimately he paints a quiet, poignant portrait of father and son, played by nonprofessionals Lamberto Maggiorani and Enzo Staiola, whose understated performances carry the heart of the film. De Sica and scenarist Cesare Zavattini also collaborated on Shoeshine, Miracle in Milan, and Umberto D, all classics in the neorealist vein, but none of which approach the simple poetry and quiet power achieved in The Bicycle Thief. --Sean Axmaker
The Bicycle Thief is a film classic. Should be a part of every film buff's collection.
A True Marxist Film - Capsule review
Masterpiece. To see is to cry. Incredible locations full of people and our heroes in the search of the bicycle that allows the family to grow. Without the bicycle there is no work, without work, there is nothing.
Thieves Like Us
The transalation of Ladri di Biceclette would properly be translated "Bicycle Thieves". The title is not a niggling detail, but serves as an important plot point, and although the central action circles around a man's search for his stolen bicycle, and for the thief..there is another thief, whose life concerns us intimately.
There are, in fact, many thieves-men and boys reduced to extreme poverty, without means of support, some of whom, driven by circumstances beyond their control who make the terrible decision to betray their moral codes in order to survive, some of whom have no moral codes. Morality seems a luxury in a world gone mad. (Compare this attitude to the dialogue scene of "apres-guerre" in Kurosawa's post-war film "Stray Dog").
This terrible pressure to survive at any cost is illustrated so powerfully, you will feel the moral dilemma that faces the protagonist as a personal look into the mouth of hell.
Vittorio de Sica films a post-war Rome and its outskirts that is seething in angry poverty. There is not enough work, and the work that exists is hard. A man's hopes are dashed, his humanity disassembled bit by bit until he is driven to a rash act in which he betrays himself and that humiliates him before his young son.
Filmed with sensitivity, the images expose a Rome of the post-war moment, parts of which still look familiar today. The light, the rain, the sun, the sunset, the Tevere, the bridges, the shops and buildings, the faces of the people crowding a tram...all of these things persist, although years have passed since the images were recorded.
What is different now, is that the poverty that persists is isolated to small areas of the city and to particular populations. What is different now is that we do not ask "what is wrong with society that such poverty exists? " There is the assumption that the poor are lazy or defective.
We may look to Vittorio de Sica's masterpiece to remind us of the disenfranchised who, through no fault of their own, are denied a meaningful place in society, and who can be driven to acts of desperation.
Clearly, de Sica feels the fall of the protagonist as a tragedy. He shows us a man who, despite all his earnest desire to be a good father, a good provider, a good worker in society, fails at all his attempts, and then, takes a moral fall into the abyss. De Sica films the final decision before the fall as a moment of supreme tension, extreme indecision and desperation.
What would you do, in a similar situation? This is the question that de Sica asks the audience.
This remarkably compassionate, profound film offers us the opportunity to ask of ourselves meaningful questions about our lives, our moral beliefs, our society and its inequities.
At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Anita Ekberg Director(s): Federico Fellini DVD Release Date: Released the 21 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Giuseppe Tornatore's beautiful 1988 film about a little boy's love affair with the movies deservedly won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film and a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Philippe Noiret plays a grizzled old projectionist who takes pride in his presentation of screen dreams for a town still recovering from World War II. When a child (Jacques Perrin) demonstrates fascination not only for movies but also for the process of showing them to an audience, a lifelong friendship is struck. This isn't just one of those films for people who are already in love with the cinema. But if you are one of those folks, the emotional resonance between the action in Tornatore's world and the images on Noiret's screen will seem all the greater--and the finale all the more powerful. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Enzo Cannavale - Philippe Noiret Director(s): Giuseppe Tornatore DVD Release Date: Released the 18 February 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The Allies had barely driven the Nazis out of Rome when Roberto Rosselini went to work on Open City, considered by most to be his greatest work. Shot on bits and short ends of scavenged film, this film helped define Italian neorealism. Audiences were convinced that the actors were all amateurs (they weren't) and the whole film was improvised (it wasn't; the three screenwriters included Federico Fellini). With its semidocumentary camera style and use of actual locations, the film does feel very real. Of course, so does the opening half-hour of Saving Private Ryan, and like that film Open City is at its heart a classic war yarn any Hollywood studio would feel at home with. The story involves members of the Italian underground trying to smuggle badly needed cash out... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Aldo Fabrizi - Anna Magnani Director(s): Roberto Rossellini DVD Release Date: Released the 29 October 1997 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Italian star and filmmaker Massimo Troisi was dying of heart failure even before this film, his dream project, began production, and he prevailed upon British director Michael Radford (White Mischief) to see him and the film through to the end. (The 40-year-old Troisi, a beloved comic actor in Italy, died the day production wrapped.) Based on true events, Troisi plays a shy postman who strikes up an unlikely friendship with exiled Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret). Through Neruda's example and tutelage, the hero learns to think of his Italian fishing village in lyrical terms, as well as how to talk to women and even find the strength to take his political stands. Sweet as it is, the film finally pushes beyond its charming borders to become an even more complex and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Massimo Troisi Director(s): Michael Radford DVD Release Date: Released the 14 March 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Sergei Eisenstein's revolutionary sophomore feature has so long stood as a textbook example of montage editing that many have forgotten what an invigoratingly cinematic experience he created. A 20th-anniversary tribute to the 1905 revolution, Eisenstein portrays the revolt in microcosm with a dramatization of the real-life mutiny aboard the battleship Potemkin. The story tells a familiar party-line message of the oppressed working class (in this case the enlisted sailors) banding together to overthrow their oppressors (the ship's officers), led by proto-revolutionary Vakulinchuk. When he dies in the shipboard struggle the crew lays his body to rest on the pier, a moody, moving scene where the citizens of Odessa slowly emerge from the fog to pay their respects. As the crowd grows... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Aleksandr Antonov - Vladimir Barsky Director(s): Sergei M. Eisenstein - Grigori Aleksandrov DVD Release Date: Released the 10 March 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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